Tag Archives: Bryant Gumbel

NewBlackMan: What’s in a Name? The ‘Plantation’ Metaphor and the NBA

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What’s in a Name? The ‘Plantation’ Metaphor and the NBA

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

Several weeks back, at the conclusion of HBO’s Real Sports, Bryant Gumbel took David Stern to task for his arrogance, “ego-centric approach” and eagerness “to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men, as if they were his boys.” Highlighting the power imbalances and the systematic effort to treat the greatest basketball players on earth as little more than “the help,” Gumbel invoked a historic frame to illustrate his argument.

If the NBA lockout is going to be resolved anytime soon, it seems likely to be done in spite of David Stern, not because of him. I say that because the NBA’s infamously ego-centric commissioner seems more hell-bent lately on demeaning the players than resolving his league’s labor impasse.

How else to explain Stern’s rants in recent days? To any and everyone who would listen, he has alternately knocked union leader Billy Hunter, said the players were getting inaccurate information, and started sounding Chicken Little claims about what games might be lost, if players didn’t soon see things his way.

Stern’s version of what’s been going on behind closed doors has of course been disputed. But his efforts were typical of a commissioner that has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men, as if they were his boys.

It’s part of Stern’s M.O. Like his past self-serving edicts on dress code or the questioning of officials, his moves were intended to do little more than show how he’s the one keeping the hired hands in place. Some will of course cringe at that characterization, but Stern’s disdain for the players is as palpable and pathetic as his motives are transparent. Yes the NBA’s business model is broken. But to fix it, maybe the league’s commissioner should concern himself most with a solution, and stop being part of the problem.

Not surprisingly, his comments have evoked widespread criticism and scorn. Even less surprising, commentators have chastised Gumbel for inserting race into the discussions, as if race isn’t central to the lockout, the media coverage, and fan reaction. As evidence, the response to Gumbel, and the ubiquitous efforts to blame the lockout and the labor situation on the players through racialized language (see here for example – h/t @resisting_spec), illustrates the ways in which race and hegemonic ideas of blackness operates in this context.

Also revealing has been the response to Jeffrey Kessler, a lawyer for the NBA players Association, who similarly described David Stern’s treatment of the players. He told the Washington Post: “To present that in the context of ‘take it or leave it,’ in our view, that is not good faith. Instead of treating the players like partners, they’re treating them like plantation workers.” While his comment elicited some backlash along with an apology, the vitriol and the level of indignation didn’t match the reaction to Gumbel.

Beyond the power of white privilege in this regard, what has been striking has been the references to history by the anti-Gumbel/Kessler crowd; much of the criticism at Gumbel and Kessler has focused on their historic amnesia. That is, their comments, while being inaccurate, unfair, and infusing race into otherwise colorblind situation, are disrespectful towards the history of slavery in America. References to slavery in this context betray the violent history of American slavery. In “Occupy the NBA: A Plea from an Avid Basketball Fan” Timothy Jones takes Gumbel to task for the historic slight here:

I’m appalled that anyone would compare this situation to slavery. I have great respect for Bryant Gumbel, but his quote that David Stern sees himself as a modern day plantation overseer is not only disrespectful to our ancestors, but it also did nothing to help this situation. Stern may not be handling this situation well, he may not have the best interest of the players in mind, he may be a mean person (I really have no clue), but I do know that brothers making millions of dollars are nothing like slaves on a plantation.

Charles Barkley agreed, referring to Gumbel’s comments as “stupid” and “disrespectful to black people who went through slavery. When (you’re talking about) guys who make $5 million a year.” Likewise, Scott Reid questioned the use of such an analogy given history: “The point is that too many people inappropriately use slavery and enslaved people to make points about things that are nowhere close to comparison. All of these casual slavery analogies do nothing but diminish one of the worst crimes against humanity in human history. Comparing enslaved Africans, or anyone else for that matter since slavery still exists for many enslaved people, is not only absurd, it is just plain disrespectful to the memory of the millions who perished under the worst kind of injustice.”

Continue reading @ NewBlackMan: What’s in a Name? The ‘Plantation’ Metaphor and the NBA.

Megan Greenwell: “To End the NBA Lockout, David Stern Must Shut His Mouth – Business – GOOD

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To End the NBA Lockout, David Stern Must Shut His Mouth

Megan Greenwell

Greedy bosses want to cut employees’ pay. The union tries to fight back. So the CEO, a longtime bully to organized labor, pats the workers on their heads with an admonition: You can’t possibly understand such complex negotiations. Let the grownups decide what’s best for you.

If this were Walmart, we’d all be outraged, but not when it’s millionaires fighting against billionaires in the NBA. Yet the paternalism is no less ugly because of the amount of money involved. And it gets uglier when you consider the racial undertones that necessarily lurk in an industry where every owner but one is white and 83 percent of the workers are black [PDF]. Lately, those tensions have been bubbling to the surface—most egregiously in the acidic condescension of Commissioner David Stern.

The lockout has already claimed the first month of NBA games, and the possibility of losing the entire season grows more likely every day. The players and team owners remain miles apart on how to structure the league’s salary cap and revenue-sharing agreement in the age of ballooning player contracts and a weak national economy. There are legitimate disagreements at work here, but that doesn’t justify Stern’s condescension toward the men who are ostensibly his colleagues.

Things started to heat up a week ago, when commentator Bryant Gumbel voiced what many people sympathetic to the players had been thinking: Commissioner David Stern is on a power trip that knows no bounds. Stern has “always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men as if they were his boys,” Gumbel said, adding that Stern seems most interested in showing “how he’s the one keeping the hired hands in their place.”

It’s important to note, as Deadspin has, that “hired hands” are not the same as slaves, even in the context of a plantation. Gumbel didn’t “play the race card”; he correctly identified the power dynamic that has arisen from Stern and the owners’ fundamental misunderstanding of the value the players bring to a basketball league. Many people have said they refuse to sympathize with players making millions of dollars a year, but they, too, miss the point: Paternalism is paternalism, no matter how much money is involved.

Before the week was out, another prominent sports commentator had drawn fire for his own interpretation of the dynamic between players and owners. In a column largely critical of the owners, Bill Simmons wrote, “I don’t trust the players’ side to make the right choices, because they are saddled with limited intellectual capital. (Sorry, it’s true.) The owners’ side can’t say the same; they should be ashamed.” This came on the heels of a piece in which Simmons argued that Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce shouldn’t have been allowed to talk in a meeting because they spent a combined total of three years in college—as if higher education was the main criterion for being able to represent one’s own interests.

Simmons’ labeling of basketball players as stupid—he later defended himself by tweeting that other athletes are equally dumb—has been roundly criticized, most eloquently by David J. Leonard on the New Black Man blog. But what struck me is not that a sportswriter thinks the players he covers have “limited intellectual capital,” but that the NBA commissioner agrees with him.

The same day Simmons wrote about players’ lack of higher education, Stern blamed National Basketball Players’ Association chief Billy Hunter—an attorney, not a basketball player—for misleading union members about the specifics of the owners’ proposals in an interview on The Dan Patrick Show. It was not the first time Stern had tried to bully Hunter and NBA players through the media, but on this occasion, he went further than ever.

Continue reading @ To End the NBA Lockout, David Stern Must Shut His Mouth – Business – GOOD.

Dave Zirin: The Sporting Scene: Economics, Race, and the N.B.A. Lockout : The New Yorker

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October 24, 2011

Economics, Race, and the N.B.A. Lockout

Posted by Dave Zirin

 

Last Tuesday evening, at the end of HBO’s “Real Sports,” Bryant Gumbel referred to David Stern, the commissioner of the N.B.A., as a “plantation overseer.” Coming at a point when the players have been locked out for four months, negotiations are at a standstill, and a substantial part of the season has already been cancelled, the remarks added to a simmering debate.

How can the horrors of the slave trade possibly be compared to a billion-dollar labor negotiation? It’s a fair question, but the metaphor, and the conflict it evokes, is as old as professional sports itself. In the nineteenth century, a white player named John Montgomery Ward was described as leading a “slave revolt” against Major League Baseball. In 1964, Muhammad Ali said that he would “no longer be a slave.” Five years later, the baseball player Curt Flood called himself “a well paid slave” because of his inability to exercise free agency (for which he went to court, and lost both the case and his career). Contemporary athletes such as Larry Johnson, Anthony Prior, Warren Sapp, and Adrian Peterson have used the formulation. It’s been deployed by players to describe a feeling of being condescended to—of being treated as boys instead of men—and of lacking control of their own livelihoods.

In the N.B.A., where every owner but one (Michael Jordan) is white, and eighty-six per cent of the players are black, racial tensions have been unspoken but tangible—as illustrated by a scene two weeks ago. David Stern was sitting across the negotiating table from a constellation of the league’s stars. He then became, per his usual style, openly contemptuous of the players “inability to understand” the financial challenges faced by ownership, according to ESPN’s Ric Bucher. He rolled his eyes. He took deep breaths. He then pointed his finger repeatedly toward the face of the Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade. Wade, who is twenty-nine, is one of the most popular faces in the N.B.A. among fans. He interrupted Stern. “You’re not pointing your finger at me,” Wade said, according to Bucher. “I’m not your child.”

Most immediately, Gumbel’s comments looked at David Stern’s management style through a racial lens. That is, in a sense, tragic, since Stern’s résumé has all the trappings of a racial progressive. He’s served on the board of the N.A.A.C.P. He’s led a league that has long had the best record in terms of hiring people of color as coaches and executives. Even in ownership, the N.B.A. is the only major sport in which a person of African descent sits in the owner’s box. But none of that has protected him from the latest accusations. These dynamics didn’t develop overnight, and for that he bears most of the blame.

Over the last decade, Stern has built reservoirs of bad will. After an infamous 2004 brawl between members of the Indiana Pacers and fans of the Detroit Pistons, Stern said that he had a responsibility to “the ticket-buying fan” to clean up the league. He instituted a dress code. He created a list of verboten establishments where players couldn’t socialize when on the road. He set age limits on when players could enter the league. He met with the Republican strategist Matthew Dowd to discuss how to give the league “red state appeal.” When he had the N.B.A.’s official magazine, “Hoop,” airbrush out Allen Iverson’s tattoos, it was seen as an attack on the “hip-hop generation” of players. Yet Stern did little to reach out or correct the record.

For N.B.A. fans, the most maddening part about this should be that the suspicion of Stern means that no one on the players’ side trusts either him or the financial figures he has been pointing to in negotiations. The league is coming off of the most profitable season in its history, but Stern insists that as many as twenty-three of its thirty teams are losing money. Players don’t believe him, especially as his solution to “the crisis of team profitability” is to take back money that is going to them. Stern refuses to consider a solution that would involve his owners sharing television revenue, as N.F.L. teams do.

Continue reading @ The Sporting Scene: Economics, Race, and the N.B.A. Lockout : The New Yorker.

Bryant Gumbel, the NBA Lockout and David Stern as “Plantation Overseer”

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In what was a refreshing and inspiring end to the always-great Real Sports, Bryant Gumbel took David Stern to task for his arrogance, “ego-centric approach” and eagerness “to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men, as if they were his boys.”  You can see the full transcript below.  I applaud Gumbel for speaking truth to power and disrupting the narrative that has demonized players and pushed the blame in their direction. Not surprisingly, his comments have evoked criticism and scorn: Example #1, Example #2, Example #3)

Even less surprising commentators have chastised Gumbel for inserting race into the discussions, as if race wasn’t central to the lockout, the media coverage, and its overall meaning.   Keep up the good work Bryant, keep challenging the sports media, which so often functions as communications director for the NBA and David Stern.  The response to Gumbel, and the ubiquitous efforts to blame the lockout and the labor situation on the players through racialized language (see here for example – h/t @resisting_spec), illustrates the ways in which race and hegemonic ideas of blackness operates in this context.

Full Statement from Gumbel:

If the NBA lockout is going to be resolved anytime soon, it seems likely to be done in spite of David Stern, not because of him. I say that because the NBA’s infamously ego-centric commissioner seems more hell-bent lately on demeaning the players than resolving his league’s labor impasse.

How else to explain Stern’s rants in recent days? To any and everyone who would listen, he has alternately knocked union leader Billy Hunter, said the players were getting inaccurate information, and started sounding Chicken Little claims about what games might be lost, if players didn’t soon see things his way.

Stern’s version of what’s been going on behind closed doors has of course been disputed. But his efforts were typical of a commissioner that has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men, as if they were his boys.

It’s part of Stern’s M.O. Like his past self-serving edicts on dress code or the questioning of officials, his moves were intended to do little more than show how he’s the one keeping the hired hands in place. Some will of course cringe at that characterization, but Stern’s disdain for the players is as palpable and pathetic as his motives are transparent. Yes the NBA’s business model is broken. But to fix it, maybe the league’s commissioner should concern himself most with a solution, and stop being part of the problem.